A View From The Top

Aloha Poke reimagining the brick-and-mortar concept

Chris Birkinshaw, CEO, Aloha Poke Co., discusses why brands should consider an order-and-pay-first model.

February 10, 2021

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By Chris Birkinshaw, CEO, Aloha Poke Co

COVID-19 has changed the landscape of many businesses forever. As we move forward with vaccines and a stronger understanding of how the virus spreads, businesses are more confident in re-opening. Some are returning to pre-COVID operations, while others have taken on a complete re-design of operations to survive. For the restaurant industry, reimagining the brick-and-mortar concept is taking place at a rapid, reactive rate, despite many trends being evident before COVID. At Aloha Poke, we were re-conceptualizing our operations for the future well before the global pandemic. As it turns out, the pandemic created an entire industry to figure out new ways to sustain and grow brand integrity while trying to reach both loyal and new customers.

The Aloha Poke model allowed us to lean in as COVID sharply accelerated trends that were already there, rather than abruptly pivot or need to re-concept entirely. Here are a few steps we've taken and the reasons and lessons behind our philosophy and experience.

Reduced costs for back-of-house operations
The single most significant advantage we have is fairly straightforward. As a poke restaurant, nearly 100 percent of our menu consists of raw foods with the finest, healthiest ingredients. Our specialized menu means we don't have fryers, we don't have grills, and we don't have ovens. These back of house utilities take up a lot of space and require a lot of energy. They require ventilation and fryer suppression.

As a result, we are able to dedicate more of our square footage toward our customer areas. Most of the time, we use less square footage overall in our buildouts to run a leaner business model with more focus on serving our customers.

Secondly, a relatively common fast-casual restaurant build involves putting a 20-to-25-foot line in the middle of a restaurant, and you put everything behind a sneeze guard. And then you've got your cooking and production equipment behind that, and it takes up a lot of space and requires a lot of labor. With a 25-foot food production line, you're either going to have a lot of employees standing behind it, or one or two running 50 feet back and forth to take care of a customer.

The third component is that this type of model is not conducive to a frictionless customer experience. Customers enter a restaurant, tell one person the base order, then another for meat ingredients, then another for vegetable ingredients, then another for an up-sells and final payment. And because it is challenging to prepare orders for customers traversing the length of the line and make digital pick-up or delivery orders, often the answer is to have a second, duplicate equipment line for digital orders.

Though there are concepts that are very good at this model and are adapting it for the digital future, I don't recommend concept development with this model anymore. Instead, consider an order-and-pay-first model. As a result, the customer only needs to talk to one person, or if they order digitally, they don't need to talk to anyone at all. We have learned at Aloha Poke that our crew can work very accurately and quickly from tickets sent to the kitchen, prepare the food, and then hand off or deliver that to the customer without having them navigate a long service line. Customers do not have to engage with multiple employees. A second make line is not necessary to service digital orders. At Aloha Poke, our model solves for square footage efficiency, operational and customer convenience, and liberates us from requiring 2,000+ square feet of real estate.

Advice on post-COVID fast casual buildoout

Trends associated with convenience have been growing for some time, long before COVID. At every restaurant conference, I've attended pre-COVID, there were two primary topics of conversation. One was the pain and challenge of employee acquisition and talent retention in a high-turnover, labor-intensive industry. The second was, what do we do about third-party delivery and the painful commissions and fees? On the second topic, the scrambling the industry is seeing now was already being discussed well before the global pandemic. I assert that COVID simply accelerated trends that were already occurring themselves in the industry.

Interestingly, the divergence between fast food and fast casual has been blurring for some time. When fast casual disrupted the QSR industry in the 2000s, the differentiators were clear: on one hand there were the sometimes shabby fast-food machines offering the most calories per dollar and on the other hand there were the new kids on the block providing higher-quality food and a different experience in a setting where you weren't embarrassed to hang out. Then the QSR industry did what great companies do – they evolved to enhance convenience, embrace technology, and dramatically modernize their builds and remodels to all but remove the distinctions.

One distinction — the fast casual pay-last model — often does remain. Often to new customers it requires "training" them on how to order. To assist customer comprehension of the ordering process, fast casual concepts often worked hard with the physical spaces to guide customers toward the first ordering point and create an exit-only path from the point-of-sale. But with restaurant use changing from reliance on filling dining rooms twice a day toward convenient access points for delivery personnel and digital carryout customers, many fast casual restaurants were built purposefully to make it hard to walk in and go straight to the person at the cash register, another encumbrance to overcome in today's environment. Is it really so downscale to walk into a fast casual restaurant and approach a human being at a cash register to order?

With the sharp acceleration of convenience trends as a result of the pandemic, the challenge for restaurateurs and brands right now is to try to imagine what customers will want post-COVID. In some respects, it may be that they want to go back to experiential concepts because they haven't been able to for some time. I think the restaurant of the future will be oriented towards less friction between the customer and the ordering experience, less reliance on a differentiated physical brand experience, and more focused on the digital experience with a brand and functionality of the footprint for the consumer. Seats in dining rooms will still have their place, but far less so. The restaurant of the future is being reimagined right now. Winners will continue to own the off-premises experience while simultaneously providing efficiency and rebalancing the amount of expensive square footage dedicated toward an in-person dining experience at a counter-service restaurant.

Chris Birkinshaw is the CEO of Chicago-based Aloha Poke Co., a fast casual franchise serving poke bowls filled with healthy, fresh, quality ingredients. A veteran professional in the fast-casual restaurant industry, Birkinshaw started his career at Starbucks in store-level operations, eventually moving to Potbelly Sandwich Works, where he held senior management positions across departments including Operations Services, New Store Development, District and Regional Operations and Franchising.

Operations